 |
| Brother Scott and Jonathan |
It was awesome. We had a good week. Set a baptismal date with Mary. Also Jonathon was baptized yesterday. It went really well. Love you!
 |
| Elder Bustamante, Jonathan Garrett and Elder Goodale September 19, 2010 |
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Baptisms / Visiting GA
It was awesome. We had a good week. Set a baptismal date with Mary. Also Jonathon was baptized yesterday. It went really well. Love you!
Monday, September 13, 2010
Work Amongst the Marshallese
Dear Family,
Hey everyone! We had a pretty good week, a lot of disappointments but a lot of great things happened too. Our main emphasis this week was on getting people to church, we really expended a lot of effort there. That was the theme of several of our lessons with investigators, we had members present at almost every lesson, we did a couple of chapel tours, and we got really solid commitments out of everyone to be there. Yet out of 10 investigators that committed to be at sacrament meeting, only 3 came. It was a little disappointing, but hopefully we'll have several more next week. One couple that didn't make it are a Marshallese couple named Charles and Sabina, and tonight we are having a family home evening with them at the home of the Elders Quorum President and his wife. I'm really looking forward to that, I'm sure it will go really well. Another couple, Chris and Jessica (the ones that got married 2 weeks ago), also missed church but tomorrow night we are going to teach them in the home of one of their fellowshipper families and either later in the week or early next week we also hope to have them in another fellowshipper's home. So we're doing everything we can to help our investigators attend church and at the same time get integrated into the ward, and I'm sure we'll see the fruits of that very soon. On a positive note, Chris Jacob came for the second week in a row, and even said that at one point he started to get a little emotional. He felt the Spirit very strongly. We hope to set a baptismal date with him this week. His level of understanding isn't very high, but I think mainly because of the language barrier (he's also from the Marshall Islands, he is Charles; brother) because he is a very intelligent man and a very dedicated man. I'm really excited for the progress he is making. Jonathon is all set for his baptism this weekend, we have no concerns there, and then this week hopefully we'll be setting a baptismal date with a boy named Portes (I don't know if that is spelled right...) Hadley, who is from the island of Pompeii. It's really neat because Elder Bustamante served in the Marshallese Ward down in Springdale about a year ago, and his understanding of the culture and a tiny bit of the language has been instrumental as we are now teaching so many islanders. That's no coincidence, the Lord definitely has His master plan all worked out. Things have been slow in the singles branch that we cover for a while now, but recently we started teaching someone really great there. His name is Chris, he is in the Army and just recently returned from a deployment. Before getting deployed he was engaged to an LDS girl (out in North Carolina), but it didn't work out. He had come close to joining the church but never actually did, but is very interested in getting back on the path towards that goal, and ultimately to the temple. We just taught him for the first time a few days ago, and I'm very excited to start really working with him this week. Things are looking up here, right now Elder Bustamante and I are really trying to get the members more involved with the work we are doing, that's really one of our main goals right now, and we're finding that in order to accomplish all that we hope to on that front it's been taking a lot of effort and coordination. We are working on ways to be more organized and efficient, and already seeing great things happening with that as well. So we've been very, very busy, but I'll never complain about that! I love you all! Have a great week!
Love,
Elder Goodale
Hey everyone! We had a pretty good week, a lot of disappointments but a lot of great things happened too. Our main emphasis this week was on getting people to church, we really expended a lot of effort there. That was the theme of several of our lessons with investigators, we had members present at almost every lesson, we did a couple of chapel tours, and we got really solid commitments out of everyone to be there. Yet out of 10 investigators that committed to be at sacrament meeting, only 3 came. It was a little disappointing, but hopefully we'll have several more next week. One couple that didn't make it are a Marshallese couple named Charles and Sabina, and tonight we are having a family home evening with them at the home of the Elders Quorum President and his wife. I'm really looking forward to that, I'm sure it will go really well. Another couple, Chris and Jessica (the ones that got married 2 weeks ago), also missed church but tomorrow night we are going to teach them in the home of one of their fellowshipper families and either later in the week or early next week we also hope to have them in another fellowshipper's home. So we're doing everything we can to help our investigators attend church and at the same time get integrated into the ward, and I'm sure we'll see the fruits of that very soon. On a positive note, Chris Jacob came for the second week in a row, and even said that at one point he started to get a little emotional. He felt the Spirit very strongly. We hope to set a baptismal date with him this week. His level of understanding isn't very high, but I think mainly because of the language barrier (he's also from the Marshall Islands, he is Charles; brother) because he is a very intelligent man and a very dedicated man. I'm really excited for the progress he is making. Jonathon is all set for his baptism this weekend, we have no concerns there, and then this week hopefully we'll be setting a baptismal date with a boy named Portes (I don't know if that is spelled right...) Hadley, who is from the island of Pompeii. It's really neat because Elder Bustamante served in the Marshallese Ward down in Springdale about a year ago, and his understanding of the culture and a tiny bit of the language has been instrumental as we are now teaching so many islanders. That's no coincidence, the Lord definitely has His master plan all worked out. Things have been slow in the singles branch that we cover for a while now, but recently we started teaching someone really great there. His name is Chris, he is in the Army and just recently returned from a deployment. Before getting deployed he was engaged to an LDS girl (out in North Carolina), but it didn't work out. He had come close to joining the church but never actually did, but is very interested in getting back on the path towards that goal, and ultimately to the temple. We just taught him for the first time a few days ago, and I'm very excited to start really working with him this week. Things are looking up here, right now Elder Bustamante and I are really trying to get the members more involved with the work we are doing, that's really one of our main goals right now, and we're finding that in order to accomplish all that we hope to on that front it's been taking a lot of effort and coordination. We are working on ways to be more organized and efficient, and already seeing great things happening with that as well. So we've been very, very busy, but I'll never complain about that! I love you all! Have a great week!
Love,
Elder Goodale
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Training / New Address
 |
| Elder Clinger and Elder Goodale August 26, 2010 |
Elder Justin Goodale
900 NW A St.
Apt. A
Bentonville, AR 72712
And following is his e-mail from this past Monday (September 6, 2010).
--------------------
Dear Family,
This has been an amazing week. We spent most of it in Tulsa, which has been incredible. They were training us on a new training system that the church is implementing. They are starting to teach this in the MTC in May of next year, so right now the leadership of all the missions in the world are getting trained on it so that when May comes all of the missions are caught up. All the Zone Leaders were in Tulsa last week getting the training, really it was like an extended Zone Leader Council, then all the District Leaders will be going down to Tulsa today and spending the week there. The whole thing is based on 8 new simplified lessons that the church will use to train missionaries from now on. They are designed to help us be better teachers, leave stronger commitments, and mainly to be more in tune with the Spirit. The 8 lessons that we are taught are:
- The Doctrine of Christ - our missionary purpose
- The Role of the Holy Ghost in Conversion
- The Process of Receiving Revelation. (this one is divided into 3 lessons):
- Revelation through Prayer
- Revelation through the Book of Mormon
- Revelation through Church Attendance
- Teach People, Not Lessons
- We Invite, They Commit, We Follow Up
- How to Begin Teaching
It was amazing the principles we learned. It's all straight from Preach My Gospel, but presented in a way that makes us much more effective. Elder Bustamante and I only had a couple of days working in our area this week, but the few teaching opportunities we've had since being back we've put those things into practice with really amazing results. I'm so excited for this next week to really get all of this going! Unfortunately though, that's really all I have to report on because most of the week consisted of that training, but things are going great. I love you all!
Love,
Elder Goodale
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)